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Kubuntu, KDE Has Little Hope For Ubuntu's Mir

05-15-2013, 11:20 AM

Phoronix: Kubuntu, KDE Has Little Hope For Ubuntu's Mir

Martin Gräßlin, the maintainer of KDE's KWin window manager, has been vocal against Canonical's Mir Display Server from the beginning. He's now written another blog post on the matter in which he makes it rather clear there is little hope of seeing KDE running on the Ubuntu Wayland-competitor...

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this is nothing new really, kde stated from the start that they will not included single distribution specific patches, and to be honest I totally agree with them, the whole thing would become totally unmanageable. Nothing stops ubuntu from adding patches to make it work though.

if Mir becomes a success and other distribution will also start using it then I am sure there will be official support for the display driver.

And no KDE does not need a new developer, Martin does a fine job and its only good practice to avoid single distribution specific patches.

Comment

The Martin's approach to the Mir problem is pretty rational and logic, so there is no place for stupid speculation and fanboyism.
He explains very well that in KDE world, the compositor (Kwin) and the desktop shell are two separated entity. This means that they need to dialog in some way and this way is the so called protocol.

One of the most important aspects from Wayland for us is the ability to extend the protocol. This has already been a quite important feature in X and we are using our own extensions over ICCCM and EWMH to implement additional functionality. Of course our workspace has own ideas and it is important for us to be able to “standardize” those and also make them available to others if they are interested. This is possible thanks to protocol extensions.
Mir doesn’t have a real protocol. The “inner core” is described as “protocol-agnostic”. This renders a problem to us if we would want to use it. Our architecture is different (as described above) and we need a protocol between the desktop shell and the compositor. If Mir doesn’t provide that we would need to use our own protocol. And that already exists, it is called “Wayland”. So even if we would support Mir, we would need the Wayland protocol?!? That doesn’t make any sense to me. If we need to run Wayland on top of Mir just to get the features we need, why should we run Mir at all?

That is a technical issue, it is not on opinion about the free software philosophy or whatever.
Another question that came in my mind is: how can you extend something that is protocol-agnostic without break the compatibility somewhere in the process?
The Mir's fanboy can please explain how they think to overcame those problems?
Maybe asking to change the KDE architecture in something similar to Mir-Unity (half fusion between compositor and deshtop shell)?
LOL.
Or maybe agreeing on the Martin's hypothesis:

So even if we would support Mir, we would need the Wayland protocol

Sounds good?
Then why not to jump on the same logical conclusion:

If we need to run Wayland on top of Mir just to get the features we need, why should we run Mir at all?

ROLF

Comment

I think Martin is more annoyed than anything. He put a lot of work into getting KDE to function with Wayland and was probably relieved about the idea that ditching X was in-view, only to find that he may have completely wasted his time. When Canonical decided "meh wayland isn't that great, we're gonna make our own thing", Martin knows that due to Ubuntu's popularity, Mir may (eventually) gain more attention than wayland and therefore might be the official X replacement. This means Martin is going to have to get all of Mir to work, while still maintaining wayland and X. I don't blame him for having a pessimistic attitude, he didn't ask for this and AFAIK, he's not paid so maintaining 3 graphical servers must be a pain. He has enough work to do with KDE even if you disregard wayland.

I'm sure if Mir came out first, we wouldn't hear Martin complain. He'd probably still point out the flaws he sees in Mir now, but I'm sure he wouldn't be as pessimistic.